YouTube Priority is Now Mobile, Music Subscription Service to be Launched Later This Year

YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki talked about an upcoming launch of YouTube Music Key, a music subscription service and its priority will be “mobile mobile mobile”

She said that currently 50% of YouTube’s views are now from mobile devices, which unsurprisingly is not an improvement from the statistics the company released in 2014. On the other hand, Facebook reported 75% of the views are from mobile from a daily count of 4 billion views. You can now understand why YouTube’s focus is now on mobile due to the relatively rapid use of smartphones to watch videos in relation to other traditional platforms like desktops.

She also talked about the difference between the video views on YouTube and on Facebook. “On YouTube, users specifically click to watch clips while on Facebook they play automatically”. Facebook’s strategy of autoplay videos are working very well for them but Wojcicki had an explanation for YouTube’s strategy: “We want our users to engage. We want them to not be channel surfing.” She went on to say that YouTube wants these users to say “I saw a video, I cared about that video, I commented on that video and I continued watching it”. Pretty solid argument if you ask me.

Back in November, YouTube had announced Music Key, which was the company’s effort to dip in the already highly competitive music streaming arena. It promises ad free music (videos, album tracks, concert clips), offline access to your music, background playback and unlimited access to Google Play Music. Although she didn’t give a specific day when Music Key will be off from beta and available to everyone, she said there are plans to launch the service later this year.